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NEWS AND VIEWS - AUGUST 2021
WRITING NEWS I finished writing the eighth Signalverse novel this month: The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night. This is a direct sequel to The White Ribbon Runs the Red Lights, and takes place about a year later. In this one, Kaden enters an underground martial arts tournament while searching for his mentor Quarterstaff, who has gone missing, and Izzy encounters a villain who seems to know even more about the White Ribbon and its origin than she does. It's a short novel, only about 43,000 words; in fact it's the shortest Signalverse novel so far, even shorter than Orchid. But I didn't set out to write a huge epic here; it's a small-scale story, not really very big or ambitious. It took me longer than usual to write this book -- from April to August -- mostly because I started working full-time again in May, but also because I'm still suffering from this insomnia that started back in January (see my April update). It's gotten a lot better, but I'm still having bad nights here and there, and I usually don't feel like writing during the day if I've been up all night. So when's the book going to be available? I'm not sure yet. My usual cover artist, Tom, is a little too busy to do the cover this time around, so I'm probably going to have to find someone else, and that might take a while. Another thing I'm thinking about doing is releasing the book via Amazon's new Kindle Vella program for publishing stories in a serialized format. We'll see. Anyway, next up is A City Burnished Silver, the final novel in The Chemical Empires series. * * * * * * * * MY WRITING HABITS My daily quota, when I'm working on a novel, is 500 words a day. It took me a while to settle on this. Years ago I tried putting down 1,000 words a day, but I could never keep that up -- I'm a very slow, meticulous writer, and I have perfectionist tendencies; 1,000 words equates to about four or five hours of work for me, and I simply don't have that much time to devote to writing every day. I've also tried writing without a quota, but that led to me hardly getting any work done at all (I also have lazy tendencies). 500 words turned out to be the sweet spot for me. (In practice, I usually wind up going over 500 words -- it's not uncommon for me to hit 600, 700, or 800 words if I'm really on a roll.) I almost always work from a very thorough outline. My outline for The Brassfire Fleet, for example, was almost 18,000 words. First I write a brief summary of the story, followed by profiles of the major characters and some information on the setting (if necessary). Then I write a chapter-by-chapter outline, to figure out the overall structure of the book, and then I write a much more detailed chapter-by-chapter outline in order to flesh things out even further. This may seem like overkill, but until I figured out how to put together a good outline I often found myself running into plot problems that I'd have to try to solve on the fly, and these would inevitably trip me up and lead to writer's block. I don't do "drafts". My outlines are usually thorough enough that I almost never have to do any major rewrites, and I'm incapable of writing something sloppy and just leaving it be with the idea that I'll fix it in a later draft. Instead I'm constantly polishing up the story as I'm writing it -- making adjustments, shifting sentences around, changing adjectives, and rewording dialogue to make it sound more natural. This is what makes me a very slow writer. After I've finished a story I read through it from start to finish to get a sense of how it all hangs together. At this point I might make a few more minor adjustments, for example changing a character's name, adding an extra line of dialogue, etc. If I discover I've really screwed something up -- or, conversely, if I discover I can make a scene or a story point work a lot better by making some changes -- I fix it up or make those changes at this stage as well. Then I spellcheck it and I proofread it and I get it ready for publication. (I always laugh ruefully when I read the "acknowledgements" pages in other authors' books. They thank their agents and their editors and their wives and their beta readers and their high school English teachers and their dogs and everyone in between for their help, and inevitably say something like, "Writing a book like this is a group effort." Not for me. Except for the cover art and design, I do absolutely everything myself, and I write in complete isolation without any help or feedback from anybody.) I write almost everything in the Windows XP version of WordPad, which looks like this: 
It's kind of a pain to convert everything out of WordPad's very basic RTF format when I'm getting a book ready for publication, but I prefer the XP WordPad because it's very lightweight and because it's what I'm used to. Fortunately the XP version of WordPad still works in Windows 10. * * * * * * * * AUGUST VISTAS A few more rural landscapes, taken while I've been out and about in western Minnesota. 
* * * * * * * * MOVIE REVIEW: SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA Here's another movie review I wrote a long time ago for another website. Our film begins with three nerds hanging out in a dorm room: Calvin, Jimmy, and Keith. Jimmy and Keith are stereotypical loser horndogs, while Calvin is a more nebbish type -- unlike the other two, he'd rather stay home and watch the rest of his horror movie than participate in their latest horndog adventure, which is to head over to a nearby sorority house and sneak a peek at a sexy initiation ritual. They finally convince him, though, after plying him with booze, and soon all three are watching through a window as initiates Lisa and Taffy are ruthlessly ass-paddled by Babs, the sorority's queen bee. Though the three losers are only about five feet away from the action, they decide to enter the house to get an even better view. They manage to sneak in, and to watch the rest of the paddling, but even this fails to satisfy them, so afterwards they sneak upstairs to watch Lisa and Taffy shower (Babs had ended the ritual by spraying them with whipped cream). Unfortunately, Babs catches them and marches them downstairs. Instead of calling the police, or something, Babs decides to send them with Lisa and Taffy to the local bowling alley -- as the final part of their initiation, she says, the girls will have to steal a bowling trophy from the place, accompanied by the three losers (I guess as a sort of punishment, since the girls find the guys disgusting). The guys meekly comply. After the group leaves, Babs reveals a further wrinkle to her two henchgirls: she'll "scare the shit out of them" at the bowling alley (which her father owns) by setting up some...I don't know, some scares or something. 
At the bowling alley (which is in a mall), the characters wander around a bit, arguing with each other constantly, because this is the sort of movie where everyone is either a jerk or a whiner. Calvin discovers a trash-talking biker chick (played by a rather bony-looking Linnea Quigley) breaking open a cash register, and starts a friendly conversation with her. Despite her boniness, he's clearly got the hots for her. Meanwhile, everyone else is raiding the trophy room. Jimmy grabs a giant bowling trophy, but before the group can get out of there, he drops it, releasing...I don't know, I guess it's supposed to be an imp, or a gargoyle, or something. It's a really terrible puppet, anyway, and it makes wisecracks and talks jive like those two dudes in Airplane. Anyway, this imp -- which had been living in the bowling trophy -- grants wishes, like a genie. Jimmy promptly and unimaginatively wishes for gold ("lots of it!") and presto, about a dozen gold bars appear in the middle of the room. More wishes follow: Keith wishes for Lisa to acquire amorous feelings for him, and the two of them rush off to have sex somewhere, while Taffy wishes she could've been a prom queen, and suddenly finds herself decked out in a fancy prom dress. Calvin and his biker chick suspect a trick, though (possibly the imp's demonic appearance tipped them off), and leave without wishing for anything. Then, basically, all hell breaks loose. Babs and her two henchgirls, who had been watching all this take place via a security camera, are suddenly blown over by a magical wind, which causes the two henchgirls to turn into she-demons. Babs escapes, but soon discovers that she can't leave the mall, because the imp has magically locked all the doors. Elsewhere, Jimmy has realized that his "gold" is simply painted wood, and Taffy is dismayed to discover that her fancy prom dress is falling apart. The imp suggests that they are being ungrateful, and orders his two new she-demons to kill them. Which they eventually do, after much running around through darkened hallways and whatnot. Keith and Lisa, meanwhile, have removed to a deserted room somewhere. The prospect of actual sex with an actual girl leaves Keith flustered and anxious, however, and he's disturbed by how aggressive she's being, so he spends the next several scenes trying to fend her off. I guess they thought this bit was funny, because it goes on forever. At any rate, he finally gets away from her, only to be killed by one of the she-demons (she shoves his face in a vat of boiling grease). Lisa is later killed as well by a transformed Babs. Calvin and the biker chick, whose name is Spider, run around the place like idiots, but they're the heroes, so they wind up surviving. They meet up with an old grizzled janitor, who had obliviously gotten himself locked in the mall as well. This guy, of course, has all the answers, and he proceeds to tell them a long story about where the imp came from and how it can be stopped. Calvin and Spider go on to kill Babs and the other she-demons, and to finally imprison the imp in a can (this robs it of its powers). Then the two of them drive off on Spider's motorcycle. The end. 
The film is...well, lousy. Of course. The story is a dumb hodgepodge of 80's movie cliches, and the script is full of unfunny jokes and campy stupidity. The jive-talking imp is easily the worst offender -- after tripping Jimmy he says, "Have a nice trip! See you next fall!" -- but the rest of the cast has their share of rotten lines, too. No one in the film is likable. Calvin is the only male character who isn't a complete jerk, but he came across as so bland and ineffectual that I didn't really care what happened to him. As for the female characters, well, they're really only in the movie for eye-candy purposes. Lisa and Taffy (played by scream queens Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens) take their shirts off every five seconds. (Astonishingly, Linnea Quigley keeps her clothes on throughout the entire film. As an actress known primarily for her willingness to take off her top in horrible bombs like this one, I must say I was surprised.) On the other hand, the film is at least professionally edited and filmed, and as bad as most of the cast is, their acting is usually competent (not "good", mind you -- just competent). That's not something you can usually say about cheapo 80's horror/exploitation flicks like this one. Huge scream-queen fans may want to check it out, and maybe bad movie fans as well, if they happen to find themselves with an afternoon to kill, but everyone else will probably want to avoid it. |